Thank God it’s over

I spent Saturday night somewhere I usually don’t spend any time whatsoever: a church. We were invited by our landlord to a concert (he plays the violin professionally). The church is just down the road from us and so we thought, yeah, why not?

And it was very nice of him to invite us, but…the concert turned out to be a choir singing about God, Jesus and so forth for two hours. That might not sound long, but when you’re an atheist squished into a cold, hard church pew, and can’t move for fear of disturbing other people, and your behind’s rapidly losing all feeling, it ain’t so comfortable. Sometimes in life you end up applauding more out of relief that something is over rather than over the skill of the performers.

I couldn't quite grasp the fervour of the religious sentiment in the lyrics, either, but what can I say – I’m clearly not a believer. I worship Sunday lie-ins instead. But I did learn useful German words like heathen and stoning, which I’m sure will come up on a daily basis.

I also got a letter from my dad in NZ yesterday that only had an article clipping in it. It took me a second to see that it was an article I had written, about Slovenia, that was published in the Sunday Star-Times, NZ biggest Sunday paper. So that was good news and I'd had no idea because the paper didn't tell me. That happens sometimes. Lukily I have several journalist friends and also family who actually read the bylines of articles. I raved about Slovenia because it was so beautiful. Here's a pic I took: